Continued from
Page 3.
Technical support
The range of scores narrowed for technical support. BakBone's
NetVault was again the leader among enterprise backup software
products, but its 5.79 rating in this category and for product
features were its lowest category scores. EMC's NetWorker trailed
the group with a somewhat positive 4.69. Among the SMB products,
EMC Retrospect and Veritas Backup Exec had solid technical support
scores of 5.70 and 5.35, respectively.
"We don't have to call them that often," said Alliance Coal's
Haueter of IBM's support for TSM. "But when we do call them, they
pretty much get us what we need." Of course, everyone would like
their tech support issues resolved on the first call, but
expeditious problem escalation is equally desirable. "HP has
stellar support," systems engineer Yoho said. "They're very willing
to escalate the problem quickly—if they can't find a solution, they
immediately bump it up to someone else."
While Price hasn't had any serious problems aside from the usual
implementation and learning curve issues, he senses that CommVault
is trying to strengthen its tech support. "They've been hiring more
people, and you can tell that calls are much shorter and
resolutions are much faster," he said.
We realize that first-level technical support is often provided
by a reseller or company other than the manufacturer. Therefore, we
asked respondents to react to the statement "Vendor's third-party
partners are knowledgeable." BakBone NetVault received a 6.62 for
this statement, well above its category average. EMC Retrospect was
also highly rated with a 6.38. No other backup software product was
rated above a 6.0 in this regard.
Salesforce competence
The majority of backup apps are sold through resellers, so some
of the survey results are more a reflection of a conglomeration of
resellers rather than the vendor directly. However, the results
highlight a vendor's ability to recruit, train, service and support
quality resellers.
All winners of our Quality Awards have scored high on salesforce
competence. BakBone NetVault did so in style this year, with a very
high 6.16. CommVault Galaxy also scored well, but with a relatively
distant 5.47. For the statement "My sales rep is flexible,"
NetVault gained its highest score (6.31). More importantly, it
scored 6.15 for the statement "The vendor's licensing formula
offers good value." EMC Retrospect had the second highest rating
among all products for this statement with a 6.38.
Licensing (how the licenses are counted and what their price is
based on: CPU, tape drives or volumes) is one of the key areas of
contention in the sales process.
"I just really don't like the idea that every time I add a few
more servers, I've got to go buy some more licenses," Yoho said, in
reference to CA BrightStor ARCserve Backup. Yoho's company also
uses HP Data Protector and she notes that "HP's licensing works a
lot better for us. It's just licensed by tape drive." Price said he
thinks CommVault's licensing is much easier vs. Veritas NetBackup.
"The system monitors the licenses and you can only use exactly what
you have," he said.
Interestingly, Veritas Backup Exec (with a 5.54) didn't win this
category among SMB products, while EMC Retrospect had its best
category score for salesforce competence (6.03). In fact, this was
the only score in any SMB product category that exceeded 6.0. This
was CA BrightStor ARCserve Backup's strongest category score
(4.86), and the only one in which it posted a positive score.
About the authors, and about the backup software survey:
Page 5.